Asleep in the Lord

Mitchell had never so much as changed a baby’s diaper before. He’d never nursed a sick person, or seen anyone die, and now here he was, surrounded by a mass of dying people, and it was his job to help them die at peace, knowing they were loved.

For the past three weeks, Mitchell had been in Calcutta, going to Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes Monday through Friday, from nine in the morning until a little after one, and doing whatever needed doing. This included giving the men medicine, feeding them, sitting on their beds and providing company, looking into their faces and holding their hands. These things weren’t something you had to learn how to do, and yet, in his twenty-two years on the planet, Mitchell had done few of them before and some of them not at all.

He’d worried that he might run screaming from the place after ten minutes. But things had gone better than he expected. On his first day, he’d been taken around by a friendly, broad-shouldered guy who ran a honeybee farm in New Mexico.

“You’ll see there’s not much organization here,” the beekeeper said, leading Mitchell down the aisle between the tiers of beds. “People come and go all the time, so you just have to jump in where you can.” The enterprise was a lot more modest than Mitchell had envisaged. The men’s ward contained fewer than a hundred beds, maybe closer to seventy-five. The women’s side was even smaller. The beekeeper led him past the soot-blackened kitchen and the equally primitive laundry. A nun stood before a vat of boiling water, poking the wash with a long stick, while another carried wet sheets up to the roof to hang out to dry.

Mitchell took it easy that day, settling in. He spent most of his time providing small comforts, bringing the patients glasses of water or massaging their heads if they complained of headache. On the whole, the men were cleaner and healthier than he’d feared. Though there were a dozen or so superannuated patients, lying immobile in their beds, many were middle-aged, a few even young. It was often hard to tell what they were suffering from. No charts hung from their beds. What was plain was that the men had nowhere else to go.

The nun in charge, Sister Louise, was a martinet with black Kissingerian glasses. All day long she stood at the front of the Home, barking orders. She treated volunteers like a nuisance. The rest of the nuns were uniformly gentle and kind. Mitchell wondered how they had the strength, small and delicate-boned as they were, to lift the destitute off the streets into the old ambulance, and how they carried out the bodies when people died.

As for Mother Teresa, she had hospices and orphanages all over India, as well as in other countries, and spent most of her time overseeing the entire organization. Mitchell had heard that the best way to see her was to attend Mass at the Mother House, and so, one morning before sunrise, he walked through the dark, silent streets to the convent, on A. J. C. Bose Road. Entering the candlelit chapel, Mitchell tried not to show how excited he was––he felt like a fan with a backstage pass. He joined a small group of foreigners who had already assembled. On the floor in front of them the sisters were praying, not only kneeling but prostrating themselves before the altar.

A flurry of head turnings on the part of the volunteers made him aware that Mother Teresa had entered the chapel. She looked impossibly tiny, no bigger than a twelve-year-old. Proceeding to the center of the room, she knelt and touched her forehead to the ground. All Mitchell could see was the soles of her bare feet. They were cracked and yellow––an old woman’s feet––but they seemed invested with the utmost significance.

Most people didn’t come to India to volunteer for a Catholic order of nuns. Most people came to visit ashrams, smoke ganja, and live on next to nothing. Mitchell had learned this on arrival at the Salvation Army Guest House, on Sudder Street. The surrounding neighborhood constituted the city’s minimal tourist district. Across the street stood a palmy boarding house that catered to old India hands, mainly Brits. A few blocks away, up Jawaharlal Nehru Road, was the Oberoi Grand, with its turbaned doormen. The restaurant on the corner, ministering to backpacker tastes, served banana pancakes and hamburgers made from water buffalo. Mitchell’s roommate Mike, an ex-appliance salesman from Florida, claimed you could get bhang lassi on the next street over.

At breakfast one morning, Mitchell walked into the dining room to find Mike sharing a table with a Californian in his sixties, dressed all in red.

“Anybody sitting here?” Mitchell asked, pointing to an empty chair.

The Californian, whose name was Herb, lifted his eyes to Mitchell’s. Herb clearly considered himself a spiritual person. The way he held your gaze let this be known. “Our table is your table,” he said.

Mike was munching a piece of toast. After Mitchell sat down, Mike swallowed and said to Herb, “So go on.”

Herb sipped his tea. He was balding, and had a shaggy gray beard. Around his neck hung a locket bearing a photograph of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

“There’s an amazing energy in Poona,” Herb said. “It’s something you can feel when you’re there.”

Originally, the Rajneeshees—who referred to themselves as “devotees”—had worn saffron clothing. But recently the Bhagwan had decided that there was too much saffron in circulation. So he’d put out the order for his disciples to start wearing red.

“I’ve heard about the energy,” Mike said, winking at Mitchell. “What do you do out there? I hear you guys have orgies.”

There was toleration in Herb’s mild smile. “Let me try to put it in terms you’ll understand,” he said. “It’s not acts in themselves that are good or evil. It’s the intention of the acts. For a lot of people, it’s best to keep things simple. Sex is bad. Sex is a no-no. But for other people, who have, let’s say, attained a higher level of enlightenment, the categories of good and evil pass away.”

“So are you saying you have orgies out there?” Mike persisted.

Herb looked at Mitchell. “Our friend here has a one-track mind.”

“O.K.,” Mike said. “What about levitating? I hear people levitate.”

Herb gathered his gray beard in both hands. Finally he allowed, “People levitate.”

Throughout this discussion, Mitchell busied himself with buttering toast and dropping cubes of raw sugar into his teacup. It was important to scarf down as much toast as possible before the waiters stopped serving.

“If I went to Poona, would they let me in?” Mike asked.

“No,” Herb said.

“If I wore all red would they?”

“To stay at the ashram, you’d have to be a sincere devotee. The Bhagwan would see that you’re not sincere, no matter what you’re wearing.”

Like the dining room itself, the toast was trying to be British, and failing. The bread slices were the right shape. They looked like bread. But instead of being toasted they’d been grilled over a charcoal fire and tasted of ash. Even the unburned slices had a funny, unbreadlike flavor.

“You know why I came here?” Mike was saying. “I came because I lost my job. The economy’s in the toilet, so I thought, What the hell, I’ll go to Southeast Asia. You can’t beat the exchange rate. I was in Chiang Mai with the hill tribes––you ever visit the hill tribes? They’re wild. We were staying in this hut and one of the guys from the tribe, the medicine man or whatever, he comes over with some opium. It was like five bucks! For a chunk this big. Man, did we ever get stoned.” He turned to Mitchell. “Have you ever had opium?”

“Once,” Mitchell said.

At this Herb’s eyes widened. “That surprises me,” he said. “That really does. I would have thought Christianity would frown on that kind of thing.”

“It depends on the intention of the opium smoker,” Mitchell said.

Herb narrowed his eyes. “Somebody’s feeling a little hostile this morning,” he said.

“No,” Mitchell said.

“Yes. Somebody is.”

If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely. But it was maybe asking too much to begin with Herb.

Mitchell drank more tea and looked around the room, at its faded elegance, the tiled veranda full of potted plants, the white columns marred by electrical wires powering the wicker-bladed ceiling fans. Two Indian waiters in dirty white jackets scurried among the tables, serving travellers lounging in silk scarves and cotton drawstring pants. The long-haired, ginger-bearded guy at the next table was dressed all in white, like John Lennon on the cover of “Abbey Road.”

“Sharks! Hundreds of ’em! Flying sharks! Everyone out of the water! They’re converging on the future!”

Mitchell had always thought he’d been born too late to be a hippie. But he was wrong. Here it was 1983, and India was full of them. As far as Mitchell was concerned, the sixties were an Anglo-American phenomenon. It didn’t seem right that Continental Europeans, who had produced no decent rock music of their own, should be allowed to fall under its sway, to frug, to form communes, to sing Pink Floyd lyrics in heavily accented voices. That the Swedes and French people he met in India were still wearing love beads in the eighties only confirmed Mitchell’s prejudice that their participation in the sixties had been imitative at best. They liked the nudism, the ecology, the sunshine-and-health bits. They’d looked on from the sidelines and, after a while, tried to join in.

The hippies weren’t the only long-haired figures in the dining room, however. Gazing out from the rear wall was none other than Jesus Christ himself. The mural depicted the Son of Man illuminated by a heavenly beam of light, his piercing blue eyes staring straight out at the diners.

A caption proclaimed:

Christ is the Head of the House.

The Unseen Guest at Every Meal.

The Silent Listener to Every Conversation.

At a long table directly beneath the mural, a large group was gathered. The men in this group kept their hair short. The women favored long skirts, bib-collared blouses, and sandals with socks. They were sitting up straight, their napkins in their laps, conversing in low serious tones.

These were the other volunteers for Mother Teresa.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to Heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like? Mitchell had eaten breakfast at the volunteers’ table once before. The Belgians, Austrians, Swiss, and others had welcomed him warmly. They’d been quick to pass the marmalade. They had asked Mitchell polite questions about himself and had politely supplied information about themselves in return. But they told no jokes and seemed slightly pained by those he made. Mitchell had seen these people in action at the Home. He’d watched them perform difficult, messy tasks. He considered them impressive human beings, especially in comparison with someone like Herb. But he didn’t feel as if he fit in with them, no matter how much he tried.

Before arriving in India, Mitchell had travelled for four months, visiting three continents and nine countries, but Calcutta felt like the first real place he’d been. Until now he’d been merely sightseeing. He had a newly minted degree in religious studies and, with the unemployment rate at 9.6, he’d planned to wait out the recession while travelling around the world (or as far as he could make it) and continuing the investigation into faith that he had embarked on when, during a freshman psychology course, he’d discovered the work of William James.

Mitchell had expected “The Varieties of Religious Experience” to be clinical and cold, but it wasn’t at all. William James described “cases” of all kinds, women and men whom he’d met or corresponded with, people suffering from melancholia, from nervous maladies, from digestive complaints, people who had yearned for suicide, who’d heard voices and changed their lives overnight. He reported their testimonies without a shred of ridicule, as these individuals described in detail how they’d lost the will to live, how they’d been ill, bedridden, abandoned by friends and family, until suddenly a “New Thought” had occurred to them, the thought of their true place in the universe, at which point all their suffering had ended.

As a student, Mitchell had kept coming back to a paragraph about the neurotic temperament he’d underlined that seemed to describe his own personality and, at the same time, to make him feel better about it. It went:

Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In [this] temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and the tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?

If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.

Mitchell had embarked on his post-graduate travels in a state of exquisite receptivity. In Europe, he had found churches everywhere, spectacular cathedrals as well as quiet little chapels, all of them still functioning (though usually empty), each one open to a wandering pilgrim. He’d gone into these dark, superstitious spaces to stare at faded frescoes or crude, bloody paintings of Christ. He’d peered into dusty reliquary jars containing the bones of St. Whoever. In stiff-backed pews, smelling candle wax, he’d closed his eyes and sat as still as possible, opening himself up to whatever was there that might be interested in him. Maybe there was nothing. But how would you ever know if you didn’t send out a signal? That was what Mitchell was doing: he was sending out a signal to the home office.

He had taken to reciting the Jesus prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. He did this not only because it was the prayer that Franny Glass repeated to herself in “Franny and Zooey” (though this was certainly a recommendation). Mitchell approved of Franny’s desperation, her withdrawal from life, and her disdain for “section men.” Still, it wasn’t until he’d come across the Jesus Prayer in a book called “The Orthodox Church” that he’d decided to give it a try. The Jesus Prayer, it turned out, belonged to the religious tradition into which Mitchell had been obscurely baptized twenty-two years earlier, and, although that was about the extent of his participation in the church, he felt entitled to say it.

Mitchell liked the chantlike quality of the prayer. Franny said that you didn’t have to think about what you were saying; you just kept repeating the prayer until your heart took over and started repeating it for you. This was important, because, whenever Mitchell stopped to think about the words of the Jesus Prayer, he didn’t much like them. “Lord Jesus” was a difficult opener. It had a Bible Belt ring. Likewise, asking for “mercy” felt lowly and serflike. Having made it through “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” however, Mitchell was confronted with the final stumbling block of “a sinner.” And this was hard indeed. The Gospels, which Mitchell didn’t take literally, said you had to die to be born again. The mystics, whom he took as literally as their metaphorical language allowed, said the self had to be subsumed in the Godhead. Mitchell liked the idea of being subsumed in the Godhead, but it was hard to kill your self off when you liked so many things about it. India, he thought, might be the place where he could make that happen.

On his third day in Calcutta, before he started volunteering, Mitchell had indulged in the luxury of a barbershop shave. In the tumbledown shop, the barber applied hot towels to his face, lathered his cheeks and shaved them, and finished by running a battery-powered hand-massaging unit over his shoulders and neck. The barber wheeled Mitchell around to face the mirror and Mitchell looked at himself closely. He saw his pale face, his large eyes, his nose, lips, and chin, and something the matter with it all. He studied his reflection, searching for a clue. A few seconds later, responding to an urge that was almost violent, he told the barber to cut off his hair.

The barber held up a pair of scissors. Mitchell shook his head. The barber held up the electric shaver, and Mitchell nodded.

They had to negotiate the setting, agreeing, after a couple of swipes, on one-sixth of an inch. In ten minutes, it was done. Mitchell was sheared of his brown curls, which fell in heaps to the floor. A boy in ragged shorts swept them outside into the gutter.

After leaving the barbershop, Mitchell kept checking out his dramatic reflection in the windows along the avenue. He looked like a ghost of himself.

One window Mitchell stopped to look at himself in was that of a jewelry store. He went in and found the case of religious medallions. There were crosses, Islamic crescents, Stars of David, yin-and-yang symbols, and other emblems he didn’t recognize. After deliberating among crosses of various styles and sizes, he chose one, along with a silver chain. The jeweller weighed the items, and elaborately wrapped them, putting them in a satin pouch, placing the pouch in a carved wooden box, and wrapping it with ornate paper before sealing the entire package with wax. As soon as Mitchell was back on the street, he ripped open the exquisite package and took the cross out. It was silver, with a blue inlay. It was not small. At first, he wore the cross inside his T-shirt, but a week later, after he became an official volunteer, he began wearing it outside, where everyone, including the sick and dying, could notice it.

“You’ll probably think this is just some opening line, but . . . call me Ishmael.”

Whenever Mitchell had seen Mother Teresa on television, meeting Presidents or accepting humanitarian awards, looking, every time, like a crone in a fairy tale barging into a grand ball, whenever she stepped up to the microphone that was inevitably too high for her, so that she had to hieratically lift her face to speak into it––a face that was both girlish and grandmotherly and as indefinable as the oddly accented Eastern European voice that issued from the lipless mouth––whenever Mother Teresa spoke, it was to quote Matthew 25:40: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.” This was the Scripture she’d founded her work on, at once an expression of mystical belief and a practical guide for performing charity work. The bodies at the Home for the Dying Destitutes, broken, diseased, were the bodies of Christ, divinity immanent in each one. What you were supposed to do here was to take this Scripture literally. To believe it strongly and earnestly enough so that, by some alchemy of the soul, it happened: you looked into a dying person’s eyes and saw Christ looking back.

This hadn’t happened to Mitchell. He didn’t expect it to, but by the end of his second week he had become uncomfortably aware that he was performing only the simplest, least demanding tasks at the Home. He hadn’t given anyone a bath, for instance. Bathing the patients was the main service that the foreign volunteers provided. While Mitchell gave head massages, he watched people who looked in no way extraordinary perform the extraordinary task of cleaning and wiping the sick and dying men who populated the Home, bringing them back to their beds with their hair wet, their spindly bodies wrapped in fresh bedclothes. Day after day, Mitchell managed not to help with this. He was scared of what the patients’ naked bodies might look like, of the diseases or wounds that might lie under their robes, and he was afraid of their bodily effluvia, of his hands touching their urine and excrement.

The neighborhood of Kalighat, in the southern part of Calcutta, derived its name from the Kali temple at its heart. The temple wasn’t much to look at, a kind of local branch building, with headquarters elsewhere, but the streets around it were hectic and colorful. Venders hawked worship paraphernalia––flower garlands, pots of ghee, lurid posters of the goddess Kali sticking her tongue out––to pilgrims swarming in and out of the temple doors. Directly behind the temple, sharing a wall with it, in fact, was the Home.

Making his way through the throng outside at the end of his third week, Mitchell went through the inconspicuous door and down the steps into the semi-subterranean space. The tunnel-like room was dim, the only light issuing from street-level windows high in the exterior wall. Mitchell waited for his eyes to adjust. Slowly, as if being rolled in on their beds from the netherworld, the stricken bodies of the men appeared, in three shadowy tiers. Mitchell walked down the length of the ward to the supply room behind, where he found the Irish doctor, consulting a sheet of handwritten notes.

“Ah, there you are,” she said. “I’ll have this ready in a moment.”

She meant the medicine cart. She was standing in front of it, placing pills into numbered slots in the tray top. Behind her, boxed medical supplies rose to the ceiling. Even Mitchell, who knew nothing about pharmaceuticals, could tell that there was a redundancy problem: there was way too much of a few things (like gauze bandages and, for some reason, mouthwash) and scant wide-spectrum antibiotics like tetracycline. American organizations shipped medicines days before their expiration dates, claiming deductions on their tax returns. Many of the drugs treated conditions prevalent in affluent countries, such as hypertension and diabetes, while offering no help against common Indian maladies like tuberculosis, malaria, and trachoma. There was little in the way of painkillers––no morphine, no opiate derivatives.

“Here’s something,” the doctor said, squinting at a green bottle. “Vitamin E. Good for the skin and libido. Just what these gents need.”

She tossed the bottle in the trash, gesturing toward the cart. “It’s all yours,” she said.

Mitchell maneuvered the cart out of the supply room and started down the line of beds. Dispensing medications was one of the jobs he liked. It was relatively easy work, intimate yet perfunctory. He didn’t know what the pills were for. He just had to make sure they went to the right people. Some men were well enough to sit up and take the pills themselves. With others, he had to support their heads and help them drink. Men who chewed paan had mouths like bloody, gaping wounds. The oldest often had no teeth at all. One after another, the men opened their mouths, letting Mitchell place pills on their tongues.

There was no pill for the man in bed twenty-four. Mitchell quickly saw why. A discolored bandage covered half his face. The cotton gauze was deeply recessed into the flesh, as if adhering directly to the skull beneath. The man’s eyes were closed, but his lips were parted in a grimace. As Mitchell was taking all this in, a deep voice spoke up behind him.

“Welcome to India.”

It was the beekeeper, holding fresh gauze, tape, and a pair of scissors.

“Staph infection,” he said, gesturing toward the bandaged man. “Guy probably cut himself shaving. Something simple like that. Then he goes to wash in the river, or perform puja, and it’s all over. The bacteria get in the cut and start eating away his face. We just changed his bandage three hours ago and now it needs changing again.”

The beekeeper was full of information like this, all part of his interest in medicine. Taking advantage of the lack of trained medical staff, he operated in the ward almost as an intern, following orders from the doctors and performing actual procedures, cleaning wounds, or picking maggots from necrotic flesh with a pair of tweezers.

Now he knelt down, squeezing his body into the narrow space between the beds.

The beekeeper had brought his entire family to Calcutta, his wife and two children, for the Christmas vacation. They were volunteering at an orphanage in a different part of the city. He was a deeply sincere, deeply good person. If Mitchell was a sick soul, according to William James’s categories, then the beekeeper was definitely healthy-minded. (“I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong.”) It was inspiring to think about the beekeeper, tending his bees in the high desert, raising his children and staying passionately in love with his wife (he often spoke of this), producing honey in every direction you looked. And out of this perfect life had come the need to break out of it, to bring it into real difficulty, even hardship, in order to relieve the suffering of others. It was to be around people like the beekeeper that Mitchell had come to Calcutta, to see what they were like and to have their goodness rub off on him.

The beekeeper turned his sunny face up to Mitchell’s.

“How you holding up today?” he asked.

“Fine. I’m just giving out the medicine.”

“It’s good to see you here. How long you been coming now?”

“This is my third week.”

“Good man! Some people poop out after a couple days. Keep on keeping on. We need all the help we can get.”

“I will,” Mitchell said, and he pushed the cart forward.

The man in bed fifty-seven was propped up on one elbow, watching Mitchell in a lordly fashion. He had a fine-boned, patrician face, short hair, and a sallow complexion.

As Mitchell offered him his pills, the man said, “What is the point of these medications?”

Momentarily startled by his English, Mitchell said, “I’m not sure what they’re for, exactly. I could ask the doctor.”

The man flared his nostrils. “They are palliatives at best.” He made no move to take them. “An American would never languish in an institution of this nature. Isn’t that correct?”

“Probably not,” Mitchell admitted.

“I should also not be here,” the man said. “Years ago, before my illness, it was my fortune to serve in the Department of Agriculture. Perhaps you remember the famines we had in India. George Harrison made his famous concert for Bangladesh. That is what everyone remembers. But the situation in India was equally calamitous. Today, as a result of the changes we made in those times, Mother India is again feeding her children. In the last fifteen years agricultural output per capita has risen five per cent. We are no longer importing grain. We are growing grain in sufficient quantities to feed a population of seven hundred million souls.”

“That’s good to know,” Mitchell said.

The man went on as though Mitchell hadn’t spoken. “I lost my position due to nepotism. There is great corruption in this country. Great corruption! Then, a few years later, I acquired an infection that devastated my kidneys. I have only twenty-per-cent kidney function left. As I am speaking to you, the impurities are building up in my blood. Building up to intolerable levels.” He stared at Mitchell with fierce bloodshot eyes. “My condition requires weekly dialysis. I have been trying to tell the sisters this, but they don’t understand. Stupid village girls!”

The agronomist glared for a moment longer. Then, surprisingly, he opened his mouth like a child. Mitchell put the pills in the man’s mouth, waiting for him to swallow.

When Mitchell finished, he went to find the doctor, but she was busy in the female ward. It wasn’t until he was about to leave that he had a chance to talk with her.

The photograph showed a slender Thai girl, not pretty but very young, standing on the porch of a bamboo hut. “Her name’s Meha,” Mike said. “She wanted to marry me.” He snorted. “I know, I know. She’s a bar girl. But when we met she’d only been working for like a week. We didn’t even do anything at first. Just talked. She said she wanted to learn English, for her job, so we sat at the bar and I taught her some words. She’s seventeen. We went to Phuket together for a week. She was like my girlfriend. It was really nice. Anyway, we get back to Bangkok, finally, and she tells me she wants to marry me. Can you believe it? She said she wanted to come back to the States with me. I actually thought about it for a minute, I’m not kidding you. You tell me I could get a girl like that back in the States? Who would cook and clean for me? And who’s a piece of ass? So, yeah, I thought about it. But then I’m taking a piss one day and I get this burning in my johnson. I thought she’d given me something! So I went to the bar and ragged her out. Turned out it was nothing. Just some spermicide or whatever getting up my shaft. I went back to apologize to Meha but she wouldn’t talk to me. Had some other guy sitting with her. Some fat Dutch guy.”

Mitchell handed the photograph back.

“What do you think?” Mike said. “She’s pretty, right?”

“Probably a good thing that you didn’t marry her.”

“I know. I’m an idiot. But I’m telling you, she was sexy, man. Jesus.” He shook his head, putting the snapshot back into his wallet.

After breakfast, Mitchell wandered into the little lending library on the second floor of the Guest House, browsing the shelves of inspirational and religious titles. The only other person there was Rüdiger, his other roommate, a thirty-seven-year-old German who had been travelling for seventeen straight years, visiting, by his own claim, every country in the world except North Korea and South Yemen. He’d arrived in Calcutta by bicycle, riding the two thousand kilometres from Bombay on an Italian ten-speed and sleeping out in the open beside the road. As soon as he’d got to the city, he’d sold the bike, making enough money to live for the next three months.

Rüdiger was sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading. He had a large head, wide-set gray eyes, and a slight Habsburg jaw, and he was dressed in clothes he’d made himself, tight-fitting maroon pants that ended at his calves and a sleeveless tunic the color of freshly ground turmeric. The snugness of his clothes, along with his lithe frame and his bare feet, gave him a resemblance to a circus acrobat.

As Mitchell took a book down from one of the shelves, Francis Schaeffer’s “The God Who Is There,” Rüdiger suddenly spoke up. “I also cut my hair,” he said. He ran his hand over his bristly scalp. “I used to have so beautiful curls. But the vanity, it was so heavy.”

“I’m not sure it was vanity in my case,” Mitchell said.

“Then what was it?”

“Sort of a cleansing process.”

“But that is the same thing! I know the person you are,” Rüdiger said, examining Mitchell closely and nodding. “You think you are not a vain person. You are maybe not so much into your body. But you are probably more vain about how intelligent you are. Or how good you are. So maybe, in your case, cutting off your hair only made your vanity heavier!”

“It’s possible,” Mitchell said.

“I am reading a book what is fantastic,” Rüdiger said, veering onto another subject. “I am reading this book since yesterday and I am thinking every minute, Wow.”

“What is it?” Mitchell asked.

“ ‘The Answers of Jesus to Job.’ “ Rüdiger held up a frayed green hardback. “In the Old Testament, Job is always asking God questions. ‘Why do you do so terrible things to me? I am your faithful servant.’ He goes on asking and asking. But does God answer? No. God doesn’t say nothing. But Jesus is a different story. The man who is writing this book has a theory that the New Testament is a direct response to the Book of Job. I come into the library here and I find this book and it is a doozy, as you Americans say.”

“We do not say ‘doozy,’ “ Mitchell said.

Rüdiger raised his eyebrows skeptically. “When I was in America they always said ‘doozy.’ “

“When was that, 1940?”

“1973!” Rüdiger objected. “Benton Harbor, Michigan. I work for a fine printer for three months. Lloyd G. Holloway. I have this idea to become a master printer. And Lloyd G. Holloway, who was my master, always said ‘doozy.’ “

“Please,” Rüdiger said dismissively. “Let’s not try to understand each other by autobiography.”

And with that he went back to his book.

Mitchell spent the rest of the day walking around the city. His concern that he wasn’t coming up to the mark at the Home coexisted, oddly, with a surge of real religious feeling on his part. Much of the time in Calcutta he was filled with an ecstatic tranquillity, like a low-grade fever. His meditation practice had deepened. He experienced plunging sensations, as if moving at great speed. For whole minutes, he forgot who he was. Outside, he tried, and often succeeded in, disappearing to himself in order to be, paradoxically, more present.

There was no good way to describe any of this. Even Thomas Merton, whose journals Mitchell had been carrying around in his duffelbag, could only say things like “I have got into the habit of walking up and down under the trees or along the wall of the cemetery in the presence of God.” The thing was, Mitchell now knew what Merton meant, or thought he did. As he took in the marvellous sights, the dusty polo grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he had got into the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins, but others contain their own ruins while still growing. Calcutta was a city like that. Mitchell walked along Chowringhee Road, gazing up at the buildings, repeating a phrase he remembered from William Gaddis, “the accumulation of time in walls,” and thinking to himself that the British had left behind a bureaucracy that the Indians had made only more complex, investing the financial and governmental systems with the myriad hierarchies of the Hindu pantheon, with the levels upon levels of the caste system, so that to cash a traveller’s check was like passing before a series of demigods, one man to check your passport, another to stamp your check, another to make a carbon of your transaction, while still another wrote out the amount, before you could receive money from the teller. Everything documented, checked over, scrupulously filed away, and then forgotten forever. Calcutta was a shell, the shell of empire, and from inside this shell nine million Indians spilled out.

There were graveyards filled with the British dead, forests of eroded obelisks in which Mitchell could make out only a few words. Lt. James Barton, husband of. 1857-18—. Rosalind Blake, wife of Col. Michael Peters. Asleep in the Lord, 1887. Tropical vines infiltrated the cemetery, and palm trees grew near family mausoleums. Broken coconuts lay scattered over the gravel. Rebecca Winthrop, age eight months. Mary Holmes. Died in childbirth. The statuary was Victorian and extravagant. Angels kept vigil over graves, their faces worn away. Apollonian temples housed the remains of East India Company officials, the pillars fallen, the pediments askew. Of malaria. Of typhus. A groundskeeper came out to see what Mitchell was doing. There was no place in Calcutta to be alone. Even a deserted cemetery had its custodian. Asleep in the Lord. Asleep in. Asleep.

On Sunday, Mitchell went into the streets even earlier. Rickshaw drivers called to him, offering rides, but he refused, horrified at the thought of employing a person as a beast of burden. Instead, he went around by foot, staying out all day, and returned to the Guest House only in time for afternoon tea.

Rüdiger appeared on the veranda. “So tell me something,” Rüdiger said. “Why do you come to India?”

“I wanted to go somewhere different from America,” Mitchell answered. “And I wanted to volunteer for Mother Teresa.”

“So you come here to do good works.”

“To try, at least.”

“It’s interesting about good works. I am German, so of course I know all about Martin Luther. The problem is, no matter how much we try to be good, we cannot be good enough. So Luther says you must be justified by faith. But Nietzsche thought Martin Luther was just making it easy on everybody. Don’t worry if you can’t do good works, people. Just believe. Have faith. Faith will justify you! Right? Maybe, maybe not. Nietzsche wasn’t against Christianity, as everybody thinks. Nietzsche just thought there was only one Christian, and that was Christ. After him, it was finished.”

He’d worked himself up into a reverie. He was staring up at the ceiling, smiling, his face shining. “It would be nice to be a Christian like that. The first Christian. Before the whole thing went kaput.”

“Is that what you want to be?”

“I am just a traveller. I travel, I carry everything I need with me, and I don’t have problems. I don’t have a job unless I need it. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have children.”

“You don’t have shoes,” Mitchell pointed out.

“I used to have shoes. But then I realize it is much better without them. I have gone all over without shoes. Even in New York.”

“You went barefoot in New York?”

“It is wonderful barefoot in New York. It is like walking on one big giant tomb!”

On Monday, a volunteer Mitchell had never seen before already had the medicine cart out. The Irish doctor had returned to Dublin and in her place was a new doctor, who spoke only Italian.

Deprived of his usual morning activity, Mitchell spent the first hour floating around the ward. In a bed on the top row was a boy of eight or nine, holding a jack-in-the-box. Mitchell had never seen a child at the Home before, and he climbed up to sit with him. The boy handed the jack-in-the-box to Mitchell. Mitchell saw at once that the toy was broken. The lid wouldn’t snap shut to keep the puppet inside. Holding it down with his finger, Mitchell motioned for the boy to turn the crank and, at the appropriate moment, he released the lid, letting Jack jump out. The boy loved this. He made Mitchell do it over and over again.

By this time it was after ten o’clock. Too early to serve lunch. Too early to leave. Most of the other volunteers were bathing the patients, or stripping the dirty linens off their beds, or wiping down the rubber mats protecting the mattresses––doing, that is, the dirty, smelly jobs that Mitchell should have been doing also. For a moment, he resolved to start right now, right this minute. But then he saw the beekeeper coming his way, arms full of soiled linens, and with an involuntary reflex Mitchell backed through the arch and climbed the stairs straight to the roof.

He told himself he was just going up to the roof for a minute or two, to get away from the disinfectant smell of the ward.

On the roof, two female volunteers were hanging wet laundry on the line. One of them, who sounded American, was saying, “I told Mother I was thinking of taking a vacation. Maybe go to Thailand and lie on the beach for a week or two. I’ve been here almost six months.”

“What did she say?”

“She said the only important thing in life is charity.”

“That’s why she’s a saint,” the other woman said.

“Can’t I become a saint and go to the beach, too?” the American woman said, and they both laughed.

With sudden resolve, Mitchell went back down the stairs and found the beekeeper.

“I’m back,” he said.

“Good man,” the beekeeper said. “Just in time. I need a hand.”

He led Mitchell to a bed in the middle of the room. Lying on it was a man who, even among the other old men, was especially emaciated. Wrapped in his sheet, he looked as ancient and brown-skinned as an Egyptian mummy, a resemblance that his sunken cheeks and curving, bladelike nose emphasized. Unlike a mummy, however, the man had his eyes wide open. They were blue and terrified and seemed to be staring up at something only he could see. The incessant quaking of his limbs added to the impression of extreme terror on his face.

“This gentleman needs a bath,” the beekeeper said in his deep voice. “Somebody’s got the stretcher, so we’ll have to carry him.”

It was unclear how they were going to manage this. Mitchell went down to the foot of the bed, waiting while the beekeeper pulled off the old man’s sheet. Thus exposed, the man looked even more skeletal. The beekeeper grabbed him under his arms, Mitchell took hold of his ankles, and in this indelicate fashion they lifted him off the mattress and into the aisle.

They soon realized they should have waited for the stretcher. The old man was heavier than they’d expected, and unwieldy. He sagged between them like an animal carcass. They tried to be as careful as possible, but once they were moving down the aisle there was nowhere to set the old man down. The best thing seemed to be to get him to the lavatory as soon as possible, and, in their haste, they began to treat the old man less like a person they were carrying and more like an object. That he didn’t seem aware of what was happening only encouraged this.

A yellow stone room, with a slab at one end, on which they set the old man down, the bathroom was lit by misty light filtering through a single stone lattice window. Brass spigots protruded from the walls, and a big, abattoir-like drain was sunk in the middle of the floor.

Neither Mitchell nor the beekeeper acknowledged what a lousy job they’d done carrying the old man. He was lying on his back now, his limbs still shaking violently. Slowly they pulled his hospital gown over his head. Underneath, a soggy bandage covered his groin.

Mitchell wasn’t frightened anymore. He was ready for whatever he had to do. This was it. This was what he’d come for.

With safety scissors the beekeeper snipped the adhesive tape. The pus-stained swaddling came apart in two pieces, revealing the source of the old man’s agony.

A tumor the size of a grapefruit had invaded his scrotum. At first, the sheer size of the growth made it difficult to identify as a tumor; it looked more like a pink balloon. The tumor was so big that it had stretched the normally wrinkled skin of the scrotum as taut as a drum. At the top of the bulge, like the tied-off neck of the balloon, the man’s shrivelled penis hung to one side.

As the bandage fell away, the old man moved his palsied hands to cover himself. It was the first sign that he knew they were there.

The beekeeper turned on the spigot, testing the water’s temperature. He filled a bucket. Holding it aloft, he began pouring it slowly, ceremonially, over the old man.

“This is the body of Christ,” the beekeeper said.

He filled another bucket and repeated the process, intoning:

“This is the body of Christ.

“This is the body of Christ.

“This is the body of Christ.”

Mitchell filled a bucket himself and began pouring it over the old man. He wondered if the falling water increased the old man’s pain. There was no way to tell.

They lathered the old man with antiseptic soap, using their bare hands. They washed his feet, his legs, his backside, his chest, his arms, his neck. Not for a moment did Mitchell believe that the cancerous body on the slab was the body of Christ. He bathed the man as gently as possible, scrubbing around the base of the tumor, which was venomously reddened and seeping blood. He was trying to make the man feel less ashamed, to let him know, in his last days, that he wasn’t alone, not entirely, and that the two strange figures bathing him, however clumsy and inexpert, were nevertheless trying to do their best for him.

Once they’d rinsed the man and dried him off, the beekeeper fashioned a new bandage. They dressed him in clean bedclothes and carried him back to the men’s ward. When they deposited him in his bed, the old man was still staring up blindly, shuddering with pain, as though they’d never been there at all.

“O.K., thanks a lot,” the beekeeper said. “Hey, take these towels to the laundry, will you?”

Mitchell took the towels, worrying only a little about what was on them. All in all, he felt proud of what had just happened. As he bent over the laundry basket, his cross swung away from his chest, casting a shadow on the wall.

He was on his way to check on the little boy when he saw the agronomist. The small, intense man was sitting up in bed, his complexion considerably more jaundiced, the yellow leaking even into the whites of his eyes.

“Hello,” Mitchell said.

The agronomist looked at him sharply but said nothing.

Since he had no good news to impart about the prospects of dialysis, Mitchell sat on the bed and, without asking, began massaging the agronomist’s back. He rubbed his shoulders, his neck, and his head. After fifteen minutes, when he was finished, Mitchell asked, “Is there anything I can get for you?”

The agronomist seemed to think this over. “I want to shit,” he said.

Mitchell was taken aback. Before he could do or say anything, however, a smiling young Indian man appeared before them. It was the barber. He held up a shaving mug, a brush, and a straight razor.

“Going to shave!” he announced in a jovial tone.

Without further preliminaries he began lathering the agronomist’s cheeks.

The agronomist didn’t have the energy to resist. “I have to shit,” he said again, a little more urgent.

“Shave, shave,” the barber repeated, using his only English.

Mitchell didn’t know where the bedpans were kept. He was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t find one soon, and he was afraid of what would happen if he did. He turned away, looking for help.

All the other volunteers were busy. There were no nuns nearby.

By the time Mitchell turned back, the agronomist had forgotten all about him. Both his cheeks were lathered now. He shut his eyes, grimacing, as he said in desperation, in anger, in relief, “I’m shitting!”

The barber, oblivious, began to shave his cheeks.

And Mitchell began to move. Already knowing that he would regret this moment for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life, and yet unable to resist the sweet impulse that ran through his every nerve, Mitchell headed toward the front of the Home, right past Matthew 25:40, and up the steps to the bright, fallen world above.

The street was thick with pilgrims. From the Kali temple, he heard cymbals clashing. They built to crescendos and then went silent. Mitchell hurried to the bus stop, going against the flow of pedestrians. He looked behind him to see if he was being followed. But no one had seen him leave.

The sooty bus that arrived was even more crowded than usual. Mitchell had to climb up on the back bumper with a squad of young men and hang on for dear life. A few minutes later, when the bus paused in traffic, he clambered up to the luggage rack. The passengers there, also young, smiled at him, amused to see a foreigner riding on the roof. As the bus rumbled toward the central district, Mitchell surveyed the city passing by below. Street urchins were begging on the sidewalks. Stray dogs, with ugly snouts, picked over garbage or slept on their sides in the midday sun. In the outlying districts, the storefronts and habitations were humble, but as the bus neared the center of town the buildings grew grander. Their plaster façades were flaking off, the iron grilles on the balconies broken or missing. Mitchell was high enough to see into apartment living rooms. A few were furnished with velvet drapes and ornately carved furniture. But most were bare, nothing in them but a mat on the floor where an entire family sat, eating their lunch.

He got off near the Indian Railways office. In the underlit interior, presided over by a black-and-white portrait of Gandhi, Mitchell waited to buy his ticket. The line moved slowly, giving him plenty of time to scan the departures board and decide where he was going. South to Madras? Up to the Hill Country in Darjeeling?

There was a train leaving for Benares at eight-twenty-four that evening from Howrah Station. It arrived at the holy city on the Ganges at noon.

The speed with which he left the railways office after purchasing his ticket and went about buying provisions for his trip was like that of someone making a getaway. He bought bottled water, mandarins, a chocolate bar, a package of biscuits, and a hunk of strangely crumbly cheese. Back at the Guest House, packing up took a minute and a half. He threw his extra T-shirt and pants into his duffelbag, along with his toiletry case and his pocket New Testament.

He was crossing the courtyard when he ran into Mike.

“You checking out?” Mike said, noticing the duffelbag.

“Decided to do some travelling,” Mitchell said. “But, hey, before I go, do you remember that lassi shop you told me about? Can you show me where it is?”

Mike was happy to oblige. They crossed Sudder Street, past the chai stand on the other side and into the warren of narrower streets beyond. As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”

Mike kept on going, but Mitchell stopped. Digging into the pocket of his pants, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar’s dirty hand.

Mike said, “I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized it’s hopeless. It never stops.”

“Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you,” Mitchell said.

“Yeah, well,” Mike said, “obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.”

The lassi shop turned out not to be a shop at all but a cart parked against a pockmarked wall. Three pitchers sat on its top, towels over the mouths to keep out flies.

“Ooh, here comes a Thai bar girl. I think she likes me! I’m going to marry her! I’m going to take her home to cook and clean for me. I can’t get a woman in my own country because I’m a fat, unemployed slob. So I’ll get a Thai girl.”

“You know what? Fuck you and Mother Teresa! So long, asshole. Have fun with your nuns. I hope they jerk you off because you need it.”

By the time Mitchell left for the train station, evening had fallen. Crowds of people were walking down the center of the street, the yellow bulbs strung over their heads like lights at a carnival. Music venders were tooting their wooden flutes and plastic trombones, trying to entice customers, and the restaurants were open.

Mitchell walked beneath the vast trees, his mind humming. The air felt soft against his face. In a sense, the bhang was superfluous. The quantity of sensations bombarding him as he reached the corner—the incessant honking of taxis, the chugging of truck engines, the shouts of the antlike men pushing carts piled with turnips or scrap metal—would have made him dizzy even if he were completely straight. It was like a contact buzz on top of a buzz. Suddenly, swooping in from his peripheral vision, a rickshaw stopped beside him. The rickshaw wallah, a gaunt dark man with a green towel wrapped around his head, beckoned to Mitchell, gesturing toward the empty seat. Mitchell looked back at the impenetrable wall of traffic. He looked at the seat. And the next thing he knew he was climbing up into it.

The rickshaw wallah bent down to grab hold of the long wooden handles of the rickshaw. As quickly as a runner at the starting gun, he darted into traffic.

For a long time they moved sideways through the jam. The rickshaw wallah snaked his way between the vehicles. Whenever he found a seam alongside a bus or a truck he plunged forward until he was forced to cut back again against the grain. The rickshaw stopped and started, swerved, sped up, and abruptly halted, like a bumper-car ride.

The seat was thronelike, upholstered in bright-red vinyl and decorated with a portrait of Ganesh. The awning was down, so that Mitchell could see the big wooden wheels on either side. Every now and then they came abreast of another rickshaw, and he looked across at his fellow-exploiters. A Brahmin woman, her sari exposing the roll of fat on her stomach. Three schoolgirls doing their homework.

The honking and shouting seemed to be happening in Mitchell’s mind. The driver’s dark-skinned back gleamed with perspiration, the sinews working beneath it as taut as piano strings. After fifteen minutes of zigzagging, they left the main thoroughfare and picked up speed, passing through a neighborhood largely without lights.

The red vinyl seat squeaked like a diner booth. Elephant-headed Ganesh had the sooty eyelashes of a Bollywood idol. Suddenly, the sky brightened, and Mitchell gazed up to see the steel supports of a bridge. It rose into the air like a Ferris wheel, ringed with colored bulbs. Down below was the Hooghly River, pitch black, reflecting the red neon sign of the train station on the far bank. Mitchell leaned out of his seat to look down at the water. If he fell out of the rickshaw now, he would plunge straight down hundreds of feet. No one would ever know.

But he didn’t fall. He remained upright in the rickshaw, carried along like a sahib. He felt ecstatic. He was being carried away, a vessel in a vessel. Mitchell understood the Jesus Prayer now. Understood mercy. Understood sinner, for sure. As he passed over the bridge, his lips weren’t moving. He wasn’t thinking a thing. It was as if, just as Franny had promised, the prayer had taken over and was saying itself in his heart: